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CULTURE: GIVING MEANING TO
HUMAN LIVES

Chapter 2

What is Culture?

There are 7 elements of culture:

1. Culture is learned

2. Culture is shared

3. Culture uses symbols

4. Cultures are dynamic, always adapting and changing

5. Culture is integrated with daily experience

6. Culture shapes everybody’s life

7. Understanding culture involves overcoming ethnocentrism

Culture is “the complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals,

custom, and any other capabilities acquired by man as a member of society” (E.B.

Tylor, 1832-1917).

1) Enculturation

The process of learning the social rules and cultural logic of a society. This

begins at birth.

All human beings are born with the ability

to learn culture, nobody is born a fully

formed cultural being. We learn through

observation, mimicry, and emulation

(parents and peers), technical instruction

(e.g., how to hold a fork, tie your shoes, do

math), and conditioning ( i.e., reinforced or

discouraged through a series of rewards

and punishments, both physical and social

(getting a spanking, Amish shunning).

Enculturation happens both explicitly and implicitly

Throughout your schooling, your teachers have explicitly taught you many

things you need to know to be a productive member of society (to write,

analyze text, do mathematics), while implicitly lessons of obedience and

respect for authority are learned by sitting in rows facing forward.

2) Culture is Shared

■ Culture is shared among members of a

society. In other words, the elements that

make up what it means to be American,

or what it means to be a Kalahari

Bushman, or what it means to be

Scottish, are commonly understood

among all members of that group. These

same elements tend not to be understood

by members of other cultures or

societies.

– Culture can be transmitted face to
face or virtually using a variety of
technological innovations.

3) Culture as a System of

Symbols

■ Symbol: An object, idea, image, figure, or character

that represents something else

– Can be verbal or nonverbal

■ Clifford Geertz’s interpretative theory of culture is

the idea that culture is embodied and transmitted

through symbols

– Example: is it a wink or a twitch?

4) Culture is Dynamic

■ Culture is comprised of a dynamic and

interrelated set of social, economic, and belief

structures

– This is the key to understanding how the

whole of culture ope

rates

■ Cultures change constantly!

■ Why do cultures change?

– Environmental change

– Population growth

– Intrusion by outsiders

– Changing values

■ Different aspects of culture change at different

rates

5) Culture is Integrated with Daily Experience

■ Integrated with daily experience

■ All aspects of culture function as a whole

■ We have biological needs, such as food, sleep,

etc., but culture shapes those activities

6) Everyone Has Culture, and it Shapes
Your Life

■ Yet, like accents, we tend to notice cultures

more when they differ from those we are

familiar with

■ In the United States, there is a tendency to view

minorities, immigrants, and others who differ

from white middle-class norms as “people with

culture”

■ By differing from mainstream patterns, a

group’s culture becomes more visible

– The more “culture” one appears to have,

the less power one wields.

7) Overcoming Ethnocentrism, Achieving
Cultural Relativism

■ Cultural relativism involves

interpreting another culture using

goals, values, and beliefs rather

than one’s own.

■ Does not mean necessarily

accepting and defending all the

things people do

– Not the equivalent of moral or

ethical relativism

If culture is emergent and dynamic, why
does it feel so stable?

■ Societies function most smoothly
when cultural processes feel
natural and stable

– People need cultural stability

■ Enculturation occurs constantly

■ Our experience of culture is
repeatedly stabilized by symbols,
values, norms, and traditions

Symbols

■ A symbols is something that conventionally, and

arbitrarily, stands for something else

■ Symbols do change (sometimes dramatically), but

are particularly stable

■ Symbols are easily remembered

■ Symbols preserve a culture’s conventional

meanings

Values

■ Are symbolic expressions of intrinsically desirable principles or qualities.

■ Tend to conserve a society’s dominant ideas about morality and social

issues.

■ Can change . . . but more slowly than other aspects of culture.

Norms

■ Typical patterns of behavior, the unwritten

rules of everyday life

■ Remain stable because people learn

them from an early age and because

society encourages conformity

■ Are usually unnoticed by people until

they’re violated

Traditions

■ Are the most enduring and ritualized

aspects of a culture

■ Are usually assumed to be timeless (or,

at least, very old)

– Makes challenging traditions difficult,

even if they justify actions that make no

sense in modern times

■ The powerful notion that things have

always been a certain way makes

challenging traditions difficult, even if

they justify actions that make no logical

sense in modern times

How is culture expressed through social
institutions?

■ Culture feels stable because it is expressed and reinforced by social institutions:

– the organized sets of social relationships that link individuals to each other in a

structured way in a particular society

■ These institutions include

– Patterns of kinship and marriage

– Economic activities

– Religious institutions

– Political forms

Can anybody own culture?

■ Nobody can own “the collective

processes that make the artificial

seem natural”

– Conflicts do arise over claims to the

exclusive right to use symbols that

give culture power and meaning

■ Cultural appropriation: unilateral

decision of one social group to take

control over the symbols, practices,

or objects of another

Conclusion

■ At the heart of all anthropological discussions of culture is the idea that culture

helps people understand and respond to a constantly changing world

■ A holistic perspective on culture illustrates how different domains of a society

interrelate, but culture is dynamic—responding to innovation, creativity, and

struggles over meaning

■ In spite of the difficulties studying culture, it is more important that ever to

understand culture, what it is, and how cultural processes work.

– The big and urgent matters of out time have cultural causes and

consequences

Chapter 4

▪ Is the world really getting smaller?

▪ Are there winners and losers in
globalization?

▪ Doesn’t everyone want to be developed?

▪ If the world is not becoming
homogenized, what is it becoming?

▪ What strategies can anthropologists use
to study global interconnections?

▪ Globalization: the widening scale of cross-cultural interactions caused by the rapid
movement of money, people, goods, images, and ideas within nations and across national
boundaries

▪ Globalization illustrates how people change their cultures because of their connections with other groups

▪ The process of globalization affects us all, especially anthropologists who seek to understand the differences
and similarities between human groups and cultures.

▪ We can begin to trace the anthropological study of the spread of cultural attributes from
one society to another to the early 20th-century diffusionists such as Franz Boas and his
students.

▪ In the 1950s, Marxist anthropologists like Eric Wolf suggested that non-Western societies
could not be understood without reference to their place within a global capitalist
system.

▪ Until the 1980s, mainstream anthropology was locally focused on research in face-to-face
village settings.

▪ As globalization has increased pace, anthropologists now realize that too narrow a focus
gives an incomplete understanding of peoples’ lives and the underlying causes of
cultural differences.

“Defining globalization is like eating soup with a fork”

Figure 4.1 p. 85 A Global Ecumene. The Greeks referred to an “ecumene” as the inhabited earth, as this map shows.

Much later, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (1976–1960) used the term to describe a region of persistent cultural

interaction. The term became current again in the 1980s and 1990s as anthropologists adopted it to describe

interactions across the whole globe.

Globalization is defined differently by different

disciplines.

Anthropologists define globalizations as the

widening scale of cross-cultural interactions caused

by the rapid movement of money, people, goods,

images, and ideas within nations and across

national boundaries.

BUT…

social economic, and political interactions and

mixing are nothing new for humanity.

Seven billion people, or 95% of the world’s
population, now live in an area covered by
a mobile network. This Connectivity, which
was unimaginable even a generation ago,
has had important consequences for
people everywhere, including these young
aboriginals of the Taroqo tribe in Taiwan.

But, access to the internet is distributed
unevenly. In 2016, more than half of the
worlds population (53%) did not use the
internet… highlighting inequality to
access.

▪ Examples:

▪ Africa = 75% of population offline

▪ Europe = 21% of population offline

During the European colonial era, Europeans were
motivated to migrate out of Europe because of
opportunities in the colonies (top map).

After the Second World War, decolonization saw a
reversal in the flow, as non-Europeans and non-U.S.
Americans began moving into Europe and the
United States in search of new opportunities for
themselves (middle map).

Today, most migrants stay within the same major
region of the world in which they are born (bottom
map).

▪ Migrants: people who leave
their homes to work for a
time in other regions or
countries

▪ Immigrants: people who
leave their countries with no
expectation of returning

▪ Refugees: people who
migrate because of political
oppression or war, usually
with legal permission to stay
in a different country

▪ Exiles: people who are
expelled by the authorities of
their home countries

“because powerful corporate interest often influence
governmental policy, some see this as a movement of

power away from nation-states”

▪ Currently, sixty-nine of the world’s one hundred largest
economic entities are corporations, and the other thirty-
one are countries.

▪ Example: Walmart ranks as the 10th largest economic entity in the
world, just behind Canada and ahead of Spain (Global Justice
Now 2016).

▪ Promoters of globalization emphasize
benefits of interconnectedness

▪ Opponents emphasize negatives

▪ An anthropological analysis of
globalization must explore cultural
nuances of global interconnections

▪ This theory explains that capitalism have expanded on the basis of unequal exchange
throughout the world, creating a global market and global division of labor, dividing th e
world between the dominant core and the dependent periphery.

Anthropologists contribute to world systems theory by asking: How
has this world system affected the native peoples and cultural

systems of the periphery?

Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without

History (1984) challenged popular stereotypes

of indigenous people as isolated, passive

“victims of progress” (Bodley 1999).

Wolf also challenged anthropology’s traditional

focus on small, local groups of people, while

neglecting the world system’s influence.

▪ World systems theory has been especially
relevant to scholars of postcolonialism

▪ These are the cultural legacies of colonialism
and imperialism, the study of which has also
helped anthropologists understand the
linkages between local social relations
(families, kin networks, communities) and
larger regional, national, and transnational
levels of political-economic activity

▪ Anthropologists study resistance by groups on the periphery, ranging from open
rebellion to subtle forms of protest and opposition. Some forms of resistance are so
subtle that they might not be recognized by outsiders.

▪ For example, females in a Malaysian factory protested working conditions via spirit
possession, making them violent, loud, and disruptive.

▪ Factory conditions violate two basic moral principals: (1) Close physical proximity of the sexes and (2)
Male management of females work

▪ Examples like this interest anthropologists because they show how people interpret
and challenge global processes through local cultural idioms and beliefs.

▪ Localization is reflected in patterns of
consumption. Many other cultures use clothing
to convey messages.

For example, sapeurs, young Bakongo men from
the Democratic Republic of Congo, use clothes to
accumulate prestige and project self-worth to the

upper classes of Congolese society.

Greater global integration also creates opportunities for local cultures to express themselves more vividly,

a phenomenon known as localization. Localization is the creation and assertion of highly particular, often

place-based, identities and communities.

Beyond “Winners” and “Losers”

▪ The examples of the Warlpiri, Malay workers, and Congolese sapeurs demonstrate
that people continue to define their identities locally, despite globalization.

▪ Today, people increasingly express their local identities through interactions with
transnational communications, consumption, and businesses.

▪ People simultaneously engage in global processes and local communities but
rarely on equal footing. Much depends on their placement within the sphere of the
world system.

▪ Most anthropologists would agree that dividing people into “winners” and “losers”
is an overly simplistic way to view globalization.

▪ Colonial governments referred to their duty
to bring civilization to the “uncivilized”
parts of the world

▪ In 1949, US President Harry Truman sought
to help the “underdeveloped” world

▪ International development is promoted by
the United Nations, government aid
agencies, lending agencies, and NGOs

▪ Just as in the days of colonialism,
technologically advanced capitalist
countries are the model for “ideal” social
and economic development

Three Big Questions:

1) A means to a particular end or

the end itself?

2) Who defines economic

success?

3) Improvement vs. forced

change, eliminating cultural

diversity with capitalism?

▪ Development anthropologists: guide development projects in ways that are
beneficial for local people, in addition to the plans of outside agencies.

▪ For example, Gerald Murray worked to reduce deforestation in Haiti in the 1970s and 1980s.
Murray bridged the gap between the goals of the planners and those of the farmers, suggesting
efficient, mutually beneficial solutions.

▪ Anthropology of development: Some anthropologists support the work of
development anthropology by exploring what kinds of social conditions might
help projects succeed. Others challenge that development inevitably causes harm
by giving more control to outsiders, worsening social inequality, and perpetuating
the ethnocentric and paternalistic attitudes of the colonial era.

▪ Anthropologist James Ferguson studied the Thaba-Tseka
Rural Development Project in Lesotho (1975–1984).

▪ The project’s goal was to decrease poverty and increase
economic output in rural villages by building roads,
providing fuel and construction materials, and improving
water supply and sanitation.

▪ Ferguson’s research indicated that people in rural
Lesotho are poor not because they live in a rural area but
because their labor is exploited in South Africa.

▪ The project focused on an effect (rural poverty) rather
than its underlying causes (socioeconomic inequalities
and subordination).

▪ The presence of outsiders also undermined the power
traditionally held by village chiefs.

▪ Ferguson pessimistically concluded that development
does little to reduce poverty and only expands
bureaucratic state power at the expense of local
communities.

Some anthropologists counter that there are really a variety of perspectives among developers
and that development is less paternalistic and more accountable to impacted communities than

it once was.

Challenges that remain include the following:

• There is a common perception in indigenous and rural

communities that outside help isn’t necessarily

virtuous and undermines self-determination.

• Change enforced from outside local communities can

be particularly ineffective since people want to

preserve traditions that give their lives meaning.

These are keys to understanding culture in the context of global change.

Anthropologists remain divided on this question, but two theories to consider are:

1. Cultural convergence

2. Hybridization

▪ The world as a “global village” a “world culture.”

▪ Ernest Gellner (1983) suggested that local traditions are
gradually fading as Western ideas replace those in non-Western
communities.

▪ The “McDonaldization” model features efficiency, calculability,
predictability, tight control over production, and mechanized
labor over human labor—characteristics of fast food restaurants,
American society, and, increasingly, the world.

▪ “Coca-Colonization” (Westernization or Americanization): the
culturally and economically powerful Western nations (especially
the United States) imposing their products and beliefs on the rest
of the world.

▪ This is often referred to as cultural imperialism.

▪ World culture: norms and values that
extend across national boundaries

▪ Shared foods, entertainment, and clothing
do not necessarily mean that humans are
culturally homogenous in other respects

▪ One major limitation of convergence
theories is that they equate material goods
with cultural and personal identity

Unique
culture

Unique
culture

World
culture

While convergence theories predict a world moving
toward cultural purities, hybridization emphasizes a
world based on cultural mixing, border crossing, and
persistent cultural diversity.

▪ Some critics argue that cultural mixing is a superficial
phenomenon or that it ignores political power, economic
power, and inequality.

▪ Still other anthropologists assert that the three theories
needn’t be mutually exclusive; convergence “fits” some
contexts, cultural conflict fits others, and hybridization is
occurring everywhere, all simultaneously.

Hybridity and Warlpiri Media: Warlpiri people of northern Australia have taken to watching and producing their own films. Their

cinematic productions reflect particular social dynamics and perspectives, in the process of hybridizing Western technology and

its practices.

▪ Anthropologists most often conduct fieldwork at a single location. How can they
study a local phenomenon in a community without losing sight of the international
factors and forces shaping that community?

▪ One solution is multi-sited ethnography.

▪ Multisited research is fast becoming a common anthropological research strategy for investigating
transnational phenomena like environmental issues, the media, international religious movements,
and the spread of science and technology.

“Not everyone participates equally,

so anthropological interest lies in

the power relationships and

inequality that it creates.”